The Impact of Training on Medication Error Rate of the Emergency Department in Hospitals Affiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences

AbstractIntroduction: Medication errors are the most common type of medical errors that cancause serious problems for public health and are considered a threat to patient safety.This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of patient safety trainingon nurses’ medication errors at the emergency department of a hospital of GolestanProvince in Iran.Methods: The present quasi-experimental study was conducted from March toSeptember 2016. The study population consisted of nurses working at a hospitalaffiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences and a sample of 40 nurses atthe emergency department of this hospital were selected through a census. Thedata collection tools used included a demographic questionnaire and Wakefield’sMedication Error questionnaire for nurses (consisting of 21 domains), which wereused once their reliability was confirmed. A patient safety training program wasdesigned and implemented for the selected emergency nurses in the form of a twodayworkshop. The obtained data were analyzed using the SPSS-18 software with theWilcoxon test.Results: Results showed that the rate of medication errors (80.62%) of nurses wereat a low level. The majority of nurses (80.62%) scored low in terms of the frequencyof medication errors; after the training, a significantly greater number of nurses scoredlow in terms of this index (90.31%; P < 0.001). The analyses showed the effectivenessof the patient safety training program for nurses in the two domains of wrong timeerror and missed dose error (P < 0.001); however, the training had no significant effects in the other domains.Conclusions: As patient safety training can be effective on nurses’ medication errors,retraining courses on safe medication administration are necessary regarding nurses’significant role in the prevention of medication errors